Contents

I was intrigued. My first question to him was “How do I buy a computer with that already on it”, that of course being Linux. Mark explained that it not only acted as a recovery CD but that it could be installed as a permanent operating system and showed me the icon on the desktop.

I asked him if I could play around with the disk for the evening and he of course said yes.

After faxing in my story, I logged out of work via computer and began exploring my new digital visitor. I would have occasional fits of “This can’t be working.” and “Can this be legal?” Of course now I know it is but from my narrow perspective, I’ll ask you to understand my doubts.

I can’t tell you exactly when I made the decision but somewhere between playing with LibreOffice and the webcam software, I found myself dropping and dragging important files from my Windows world onto a portable hard drive.

Server

* 548,352 – the number of CPU cores in the K Computer in Japan, the world’s currently fastest supercomputer. It’s the result of having 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with eight cores each.
* 1,820,352 – the combined number of CPU cores in the top 10 supercomputers
* 672 – The number of computer racks that make up the K Computer (one is seen on the image for this post).
* 8.2 petaflops – The computing performance of the K Computer. It’s more powerful than the five next systems (i.e. position 2-6) combined.
* 8,200,000,000,000,000 – 8.2 petaflops written out as floating point operations per second (8.2 quadrillion instructions per second).
* 2.6 petaflops – The computing performance of the second-fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A in China.

Games

Bridge construction set (also referred as Pontifex II) is now available in available in Ubuntu Software Center under the purchase section. The game which tests your bridge constructions skills has received great reviews from critics and users and has won many awards.

Desktop Environments

It was big news in Canada when, in 2008, the country slipped from the top-ten list of the world’s most peaceful countries (all the way to eleventh). By this year, it was back in eighth, 74 places above the U.S. and, when liberals in the U.S. feel despairing, what dominates their fantasy life but “moving to Canada?”

And yet, today, you could make an argument that Canada has actually become one of the earth’s more irresponsible nations — namely, when it comes to the environment. Indeed, you could argue that the world would be better off if the government in Ottawa was replaced by, say, the one in Brasilia, which has made a far better show of attending to the planet’s welfare. It’s a tale of physics, chemistry, and most of all economics, and it all starts in the western province of Alberta.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

One of the primary results of Platform 11 was gaining consensus on making KDE’s development platform more modular, with each library (or technology within it) clearly defined in its purpose and how it can be deployed for use in a Qt or KDE application.

GNOME Desktop

With so much controversy surrounding the recent release of GNOME 3 and Canonical’s Unity, there’s only one way to resolve things: a head-to-head battle royale. Gareth Halfacree investigates which next-generation desktop environment might suit you better to set the record straight once and for all…

GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell have their fans, who castigate Canonical’s Unity – and vice-versa. There are also those who decry both, claiming that a move to icon-based launchers represents a dumbing-down of the classic GNOME user interface. Worries over compatibility and extensibility cause further concerns, until nobody is quite sure what’s going on any more.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Almost as if Eugeni Dodonov read my post last night, he answered earlier this evening that the ISOs are now on the mirrors. I had found a copy a couple of hours before his post, so I was already burning. I had been looking forward to seeing the newer Mandriva, but in the end I’m afraid I was slightly disappointed.

[...]

All that looks stuff aside, I was really looking forward to seeing the new Mandriva Control Center that was alluded to in Dodonov’s post last night. But it just looked like the same ole same ole to me. They could have and probably did do some work under the hood, but there was no changes to the appearance. And the issue of setting up graphical drivers mentioned in an earlier post still exists. I looked in the software manager and NVIDIA proprietary drivers were included, but the configuration just seemed broken. Everything else seemed to function correctly as far as I tested. The installer hasn’t changed to the naked eye either except for the main image.

Am I happier now than I was before Mageia installation? Most likely yes. Mageia proved itself very stable and nicely composed system not only in Live run, but also in full install mode.
Yes, I still have something to work on before I can make final decision to dump Kubuntu. But that hour is very close I believe.
And even now I have system which works smoother and quicker then Kubuntu, does not have issues with desktop effects and shutdown. These two facts are more than enough.

Gentoo Family

Final Thoughts: The K Desktop Environment has all the features required to make an excellent desktop operating system, but one half of the problem lies in the default configuration shipped from the “factory.” The other half (of the problem) lies with distro developers who do not bother to tie the loose ends together. As much as I appreciate the time and effort involved in packaging a distribution, the community would be better off if more is done to ensure a more robust out of the box user-friendliness. Every feature that could work out of the box, should. The pieces are in place, they just need to be tweaked a little bit.

Red Hat Family

The 43-year-old executive, who in December 2007 took over the reins of what is now the biggest open source vendor in the industry, said what defines a 21st Century company is one with a significant number of workers who are “socially connected” through sites such Facebook and Twitter, and is governed by “meritocracy, not hierarchy”.

By virtue of being in the open source space, Red Hat has many young employees who are generally early adopters of technology and this is a demographic that he has helped lead by influence and example.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Chronic Logic’s award winning game, Bridge Construction Set, is officially for sale in the Ubuntu Software Center. In Bridge Construction Set you build a bridge that hopefully does not break, however having a train plunge into the depths below may be fun for some!

Paolo is one of the amazing people out in local Ubuntu communities spreading the word, organizing events, and helping to nurture stronger teams. When you tune into Paolo’s presentation at Ubuntu Community Week, please be sure to ask him to sign your card. (And don’t worry, the bullets he’s referring to are those that appear in nearly every presentation you’ve ever yawned through.)

We are one week away from Alpha 2, so right now you can see lots of developers trying to get as many things into Ubuntu Oneiric as possible: AirPrint, theme changes and loads of other stuff. After this milestone we will have only 4 weeks left until Feature Freeze at which stage most of the features should have have landed. As always: the status overview should give you a very detailed look on how each feature is progressing.

“The Ubuntu apologists are making all sorts of noise about how Canonical is targeting a new market (tablets and similar screen resolution devices), but we’ve seen this show too many times before,” explained Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “Red Hat didn’t get to be profitable (something that still eludes Canonical) by dumping their target customers every year to chase new opportunities.”

Flavours and Variants

Released in July, Peppermint Two is based on Lubuntu 11.04, an Ubuntu-derived distribution using the LXDE desktop environment (see our overview). Its main distinguishing feature is that it mixes traditional applications with cloud applications that are closely integrated into the desktop.

Previous versions of this distro made use of Mozilla Prism for running web applications directly on the desktop, but Peppermint has now switched over to Chromium. This means that Chromium is the web browser and also powers the rendering of web applications thanks to the ICE SSB (single site browser), a framework developed by members of the Peppermint OS team.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Licensing WebOS could be a double-edged sword for HP though. When you look at the tablet and phone market, as of this moment, Apple and Google are clearly dominating. When it comes to the tablet, the iPad continues to blow away the field. HP gets it turn at bat on Friday when the HP Touchpad hits stores.

What is the real value that Open Source has brought to the economy? This is not a peregrine question. Since most of the current evaluation methods are based on assessing “sales”, that is direct monetization of OSS, we are currently missing from this view the large, mostly under-reported and underestimated aspect of open source use that is not “sold”, but for example is directly introduced through an internal work force, or in services, or embedded inside an infrastructure. Summary: OSS provide cost reduction and increases in efficiency of at least 116B€, 31% of the software and services market.

Analytics company Ravel has announced it is releasing GoldenOrb, its massive-scale graph analysis software, as open source. GoldenOrb is based on the ideas behind Google’s Pregel architecture which is in turn inspired by the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model developed in the 1980s.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

After dealing with Firefox 3.6.17′s abrupt end of life in favor of 4.0, and then 4.0′s deprecation in favor of 5.0 (and yes, I had to change repositories every time because Linux in general and Debian in particular doesn’t force new software on users), now I learn that Thunderbird is jumping from 3.1 to 5.0.

I use the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive for all my Mozilla software needs (Firefox/Iceweasel and Thunderbird/Icedove). Now I’ll be dipping into my sources.list files to up the Icedove repo from 3.1 to 5.0 once the Debian Mozilla Team offers the new version (they generally need a little time to package it up).

Mozilla has released version 5 of Thunderbird, the popular open source e-mail client. The update includes some new features, updated components under the hood, and a number of performance and stability improvements.

Mozilla spun off Thunderbird in 2007, creating a separate organization called Mozilla Messaging. The split was reversed several months ago when Mozilla announced that it would reabsorb the messaging group and integrate it into Mozilla Labs.

The Thunderbird development model underwent some significant changes alongside the organizational restructuring. Its versioning and development cycle have seemingly been harmonized with that of Firefox. The Thunderbird version number was bumped up directly from 3.x to 5—skipping version 4 entirely. This change allows Thunderbird’s version number to match Firefox and reflect the version number of the underlying Gecko rendering engine that is shared between both applications.

SaaS

VoltDB, a leading provider of high-velocity data management systems, today announced the release of VoltDB Integration for Hadoop. The new product functionality, available in VoltDB Enterprise Edition, allows organizations to selectively stream high velocity data from a VoltDB cluster into Hadoop’s native HDFS file system by leveraging Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which has SQL-to-Hadoop integration technology, Apache Sqoop, built in.

Application developers can now use BIRT 3.7 from the Eclipse Foundation to access Hadoop using Hive Query Language (HQL). Not only can BIRT provide native access to Hadoop as a data source for analysis, dashboards, reporting and custom BI and information applications, it can be used to build data sets or data visualizations that seamlessly combine Hadoop data with other data sources including SQL databases, XML data, document archives and flat files.

As the originator of the Hadoop technology, Yahoo’s official entry into this space should play a big role in shaping how the market of Hadoop-based products evolves.

Yahoo’s Hortonworks (as in the Dr. Suess book “Horton Hears a Who,” a reference to the elephant logo that Apache Hadoop bears) will be comprised of a small team of Yahoo’s Hadoop engineers and will focus on developing a production-ready product based on the Apache Hadoop project, the set of open source tools designed for processing huge amounts of unstructured data in parallel. It’s a natural step for Yahoo, which uses Hadoop heavily within its own web operations, and which has contributed approximately 70 percent of the code to Apache Hadoop since the project’s inception.

Business

Semi-Open Source

Zenoss, Inc., a leading provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructures, today announced the availability of Zenoss Service Dynamics. The new offering includes the market’s first service impact management solution that both unifies and automates impact and root cause analysis for IT services that span private and public IT infrastructures.

Openness/Sharing

What I was keen to do there was not so much the usual “look at all the fun things you can do to money from giving stuff away”, since that by now is well-explored territory (one, moreover, that is visited briefly in the earlier slides of the set below). Instead, I’ll focus on the other ways in which openness of a general kind can provide benefits to businesses that embrace it.

Programming

The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of Indigo, the 2011 annual release train. This is the eighth successive year in which the Eclipse community has shipped a coordinated release on schedule. Indigo is available for immediate download from www.eclipse.org/downloads.

Cablegate

If you haven’t seen the new fundraising video from WikiLeaks, which plays off an old Mastercard commercial, don’t miss it. It’s smartly done, and doubly effective given that Mastercard is one of the companies that are refusing to process donations to the whistleblowing site. With more than 100,000 views on Vimeo since being posted a few days ago, you have to give Julian Assange credit for knowing how to make a viral video.

Civil Rights

Speech is never a punishment, and it strikes me as especially dangerous for supporters of free speech to suggest otherwise. If libertarians call it a “punishment” when the government subsidizes your opponent’s political campaign, it’s hard to object when more censorious types call it a “punishment” when a third party runs a nasty campaign ad against a politician. The solution to speech is more speech. I don’t love the Arizona campaign finance system, but I think it’s hard to argue that it runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Google launched its social networking platform last night. The initial response and reviews are positive. Google+ has exceeded all expectations by bringing all needed features under one roof. The integration with different Google properties and services is amazing.

Having spent one day with Google+, I can say that finally we have a strong Facebook competitor. It also puts both the companies and products under a direct comparison when it comes to data ownership.

Intellectual Monopolies

Three Canadian companies have been ordered to pay roughly $2.5- million for selling knock-off Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags in what a Federal Court judge described as an “egregious” case of trademark infringement.

Copyrights

BT has warned the High Court that if an injunction to block access to the Newzbin2 website were to be granted, it would be the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ opening the floodgates to content owners desperate to prevent sites pointing to pirated content. BT told the court that it could face up to 400 applications for injunctions in the next year if the Motion Picture Association (MPA) prevail in an action against the UK telecoms giant.

ACTA

Essentially the Council Decision would endorse it permissable that the Commission and the member states together circumvent parliament prerogatives under the Treaties (and Treaty conditions) via an Agreement with third nations using the trade funnel. Outrageous and inacceptable.

David Hammerstein reports that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been determined to be a “mixed agreement.” This means that the agreement must be approved by both the EU and by the 27 member states. That suggests a long process to obtain individual parliamentary approval throughout the EU (the EU Council is moving quickly on the issue, however).

Summary: The Microsoft lobby carries on accompanying another extortion deal while Google is being portrayed as the malicious party

The Microsoft Agenda Machine which we consistently refer to as “Microsoft Florian” will keep mass-mailing journalists as part of those campaigns Florian Müller has been doing for years at the behest of clients. A lot of people know too well what he is up to and just looking at the past few hours alone we find this lobbyist, Microsoft Florian, chatting with Microsoft MVPs [1, 2] about those who “completely disregard others’ IP”. Yes, they are trying to paint Android as disrespectful of the law and borderline illegal, as we explained before. Suddenly it’s Google — not the racketeer (Microsoft) — that’s being portrayed as the bad guy. Only in Microsoft MVP land…

Moreover, just some hours ago Florian was linking to more Lodsys patent lawsuits against Android developers (and he advised developers to just pay the patent troll for this software patent from Microsoft's former CTO). When he is not boosting patent lawyers, as he regularly does (even hours ago, e.g. [1, 2]), Florian is ducking questions about his current client. I exchanged about 50 tweets with him yesterday and he stubbornly avoided the simple question, as he did a year ago too.

“You’re never a critic of false patents, praise these actions and other lobbyists, and refuse to disclosure your boss.” –Rui SeabraRui Seabra writes to Florian, “well, I see you still cheer for software patents.”

Also he adds: “You’re never a critic of false patents (#swpat), praise these actions and other lobbyists, and refuse to disclosure your boss.”

Florian does not disclose his boss and his spin is not fooling anyone of relevance as he religiously avoids the question about Microsoft funding (he could just say “no” if it was the true answer). Instead, he is scaring Cisco (which makes Android tablets) by promoting the Microsoft patent deals as though they have merit [1, 2, 3, 4] (no patents disclosed). As we explained in this updated post, Microsoft signed a third deal with an obscure company that uses Android (hardly even known for its use of Android) because those companies have no reason whatsoever to take the dispute to court. Microsoft is like a patent troll hacking the legal system to get away with racketeering while Florian the spinner is mixing the patent lawsuits against Google with antitrust and many other Google-hostile articles, showing quite clearly the general bias. That’s just what the lobbyist did in a few hours. Multiply this and extrapolate to days and weeks. Money well spent on lobbying? He wants people to think that Google — not Microsoft — is the “bad guy” here. Amazing. Only lobbyists (with paychecks) can get away with such dishonesty and sleep well at night. Meanwhile there is this satirical new article titled “Microsoft Stops Windows Phone Development, Launches Android Patent Troll Suite”:

“I never understood Google’s OS strategy,” Ballmer laughed. “They are so confused. What’s the point of Google ChromeOS when you have Android? They just don’t know the game.” They have been investing so much in their Android and don’t even make a dime from it. That’s not how businesses work. You have to answer to your investor. Those are the ones who take care of your company and not developers or users.”

“While Google is wasting money on developing Android, we are monetizing on it. We make $5 every time an Android phone is sold. We are going after all Android companies, we have the legal force and money to scare the shit out of them. Imagine every Android company paying us $5 per unit! We can’t even charge that much from a Windows Phone license,” said Ballmer.

“Today we are launching this Microsoft Patent Troll Suite 1.0 (MPTS) and it is available to all Microsoft partners. The suite allows you to sniff all Android players and then work with our legal team to go after such companies,”

“We expect to make around $2 billion in revenues this year from Android alone,” concluded Ballmer.

People who work for Microsoft should see this and recognise what has become of their employer. All it does is sue and lobby, in order to make money out of other people’s products. It’s a lot worse than the MPAA/RIAA. █

MICROSOFT’S Office 360 (Office 365 minus all the downtime) is expected to have more outages, admits Microsoft. “BPOS gained a pretty bad rep due to a series of outages,” argues the reporter, “the most recent coming just last week, and users were praying that the new cloud iteration launched on 28 June would banish those negative experiences to the past.”

At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act.

It was honestly music to my ears. After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it.

Will the Commissioner in charge of privacy intervene to impede this? What if the datacentres which run Windows involuntarily leak out all the data? There is this new report about an “‘indestructible’ botnet”:

The botnet, known as TDL, targets Windows PCs and is difficult to detect and shut down.

Code that hijacks a PC hides in places security software rarely looks and the botnet is controlled using custom-made encryption.

BBC names Windows for a change and this whole story shows the sort of dangers people will have if services are based on Windows. Skype has not been based on Windows and recently it suffered many disruptions (just after Microsoft had bought it). █

Last month we wrote about some Mono developers stating that they would not go to Xamarin. They didn’t even bother with Miguel’s (Microsoft’s?) plan and they moved on to other endeavours. Well, now we discover that one who went along with Miguel (partly at Miguel’s expense) has just decided to call it quits:

Parted ways with Xamarin today. Reflecting on my time at Ximian and then Novell, I’ve enjoyed working closely, day-to-day, with the professionals on the Mono team, as well as our talented volunteer community. It’s been a real treat for the past 8 years.

Meanwhile, another company with Microsoft roots (Likewise) is ‘poisoning’ Linux with Microsoft APIs and a product that it paints as open even though it’s “open core” (i.e. proprietary), just like Mono, by Miguel's own admission. They can freely join consortia and act like they are part of the FLOSS world, but they are not. They are just a Samba parasite, apparently paying Microsoft for Samba’s hard work. Likewise is to Samba what SLE* is to GNU/Linux — it’s where you go to get stuff you can otherwise get for free but prefer paying Microsoft for. █

Summary: Microsoft loses any shred of remaining dignity as Steve Ballmer shouts on stage (amid calls for his firing) and also has its men shout down on companies that sell Linux, trying to extort money out of them to avoid a lawsuit (probably a violation of the RICO Act for racketeering)

Microsoft’s general manager for its troubled identity and access unit has left the company, The Register has learned.

We’ve been badgering the software vendor since Kim Cameron quit his post at Redmond in May to find out what changes were afoot within the group.

“According to reports in the Seattle Times,” says The Register, “Microsoft’s CEO shouted at a captive audience attending a civic bash in the city’s Rotary Club yesterday.” He is shouting to defend his position as CEO while his fellow thugs are also shouting — figuratively speaking — at companies that are selling Linux. According to the the Microsoft boosters, Microsoft carries on with the patent extortions tour, but it targets only small companies or companies whose use of Linux is barely known at all (thus no incentive to take this matter to the courtroom). Microsoft Nick says that “Microsoft corners another Android manufacturer on patents”, correctly (for a change) showing that there is nothing amicable there, unlike the fluff from Microsoft’s Orwellian press release that pro-Microsoft lobbyist Microsoft Florian links to (these people generally promote Microsoft PR as primary source when announcing extortion against Linux, giving attention to Microsoft press releases rather than attempt to challenge the claims therein). Just like General Dynamics Itronix [1, 2], Velocity Micro has just been extorted, as well. The lobbyist, Microsoft Florian, wrote today that “Android is neither “free” as in “beer” nor “free” as in “speech”.” Steve Ballmer said so too and Florian still refuses to answer the question about payments from Microsoft (he is almost certainly paid by them, at least indirectly). This sort of hatred of Linux was shown here before, including his shameless Red Hat bashing. The lobbying is important for Microsoft as means of changing public perception (which Florian does by mass-mailing journalists, using them as carriers of Microsoft FUD). Some of Microsoft’s income now arrives from its leech alter-ego, Microsoft Licensing, GP (MSLI) and the likes of that. It might be the only division remaining one day.

Microsoft is collapsing as a practicing company and the only thing left for it to practice (long term) is litigation, which will inevitably make it a patent troll. We continue to see some more litigation with software patents, which has a strong correlation to patent trolls. A lot of pro-software patents lobbying turns out to be financed by Microsoft. █

Update: For Microsoft, this is FUD week as another rather obscure player falls victim to extortion deals. Microsoft only targets companies too minor to go to court and complain to their government using RICO Act, for example. Barnes & Noble did complain and also leaked the evidence of racketeering; Microsoft would like to avoid that.

Contents

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com) , the world’s largest domain name registrar, has initiated a program of LPI training and certification for their technical support staff. The program began this past March and an initial group of IT professionals at GoDaddy.com have successfully obtained their LPIC-1 certification.

Sure, you can run Linux on robots and on desktops and, apparently, on small cats, and we’ve also seen it on plenty of tablets before, but this one is a little different. Max Lee over at Galaxy Tab Hacks created the video below to demonstrate a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Ubunbu, but doing it on top of Android such that the tablet’s native OS is running Linux in the background and then using a VM client to launch the UI. In other words: it’s running both operating systems at once, and despite that we think the results are quite usable, even loading up this very website with aplomb. It’s demonstrated after the break and if after watching you just gotta get a piece of that the full instructions are on the other end of the source link below.

With similar workloads, for the most part the power consumption is comparable between Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 Pro SP1. The only major differences came during Flash-based HD video playback being more efficient under Windows, power consumption while OpenGL gaming, and in select other areas. Ubuntu / Linux actually has the potential to become more power efficient than Microsoft Windows 7 based upon the close findings from today. Once Active-State Power Management (ASPM) is properly fixed up for Linux, there is still a Linux 2.6.35 kernel power regression, a scheduler power regression, and more. Just yesterday on my Twitter feed, the Phoronix Test Suite and I made a discovery of a possible 8% power savings from an entirely different vector. More to come.

Phoronix has identified the Linux power regression problems it previously noted in Linux 2.6.38 as being related to Active-State Power Management (ASPM) code for PCI Express — and has published a workaround. The problem, which can result in low battery life with Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15, have been confirmed by Tom’s Hardware Guide.

Desktop

That, of course, doesn’t mean all is lost. Quite the opposite. As has been proved over the years, the Linux community is incredibly agile, so this issue can easily be resolved. Here are some possible solutions.

Jack Wallen at Tech Republic has a good article on this subject. see 10 ways the Linux community can fix the mess on the desktop. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as he writes. For instance, I would not agree that Unity should be killed. It is great to have yet another desktop environment. I do think Unity should not be exclusive. Many millions of loyal users of Ubuntu may not want to change desktop environments from GNOME. I think, eventually, Unity may achieve a level of functionality that makes it widely desirable but forcing users to change is undesirable. Users may have to reverse-engineer Ubuntu to put GNOME back or change distros. That is probably a waste of their time, not what IT should be about.

Server

Kernel Space

I was directed to a recent mailing list post by Linus Torvalds on linux-fsdevel in which he derided the concept of user-space filesystems. Not a particular implementation, mind you, but the very concept of it.

Jeff Darcy, of Red Hat and CloudFS fame, wrote a wonderful response, which you should read first before continuing further.

Graphics Stack

Applications

Ubuntu is now one of the most popular Operating Systems used in the world. The main reason behind is the open source nature of Ubuntu and the backing provided by the vast online user community. Today Ubuntu ranks in 3rd in the list of top OS’s. The Open Source wizard supports a wide variety of software including media players. Today we review some of the best media software available for Ubuntu’s latest versions.

Isolator++ for Linux enables unit testing – the foundation of agile development – of any C/ C++ code (including complex code such as statics, globals and non virtual method) by allowing the test to intercept and fake behaviours. The API is specifically designed to make tests more concise, more resistant to production code changes and easier to understand for new users which ensures that time is not wasted re-writing unit tests. It also protects the code from regression bugs and allows organizations to feel confident that their final product meets industry standards.

The linker is a magical beast which does all sort of crazy stuff with your binaries, without you even knowing it. Every Linux install has a linker living in the shadows, though seeing it in action is a rare supernatural event. There is an ancient tradition to communicate with the spirit of your linker. Not many know about this secret dark path and it’s powers to annoy even the most experienced (L)user.

Getting ready to roll out a site, but not sure how it will perform in real-world use? Take a look at Siege, a load-testing and benchmarking utility that will help stress test your setup before exposing it to the world.

Siege is a fantastic utility for helping with Linux server management by exposing problems before they go into production. It’s open source software (GPLv2 or later) and easy to get started with.

Games

Generally, applications that are too awkward to use or lack key features eventually disappear. The apps that prevail are solid, reliable, up to date and offer plenty of user-friendly features. Unfortunately with Linux, no matter how user friendly the desktop becomes, some applications and systems remain tricky to configure and use.

I thought it might be interesting to list some of the applications that fall into the awkward category to see what experiences you’ve had with them. I also thought this exercise might help developers identify those tools that could do with a nudge towards user friendliness.

So you’ve installed one of the popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, and you’ve activated your graphics drivers; now what? While mainstream gaming has not quite found it’s way onto Ubuntu there are a number of worthy titles to keep you from booting up that old Windows partition. This article was written with Ubuntu users in mind, but it may be possible to get these games running under other Linux distros. All prices displayed below are approximate conversions from other currencies. All the games (and crossover) can be bought online and downloaded.

Desktop Environments

Continuing in a series of interviews with the Desktop Summit 2011′s keynote speakers, this past week William Carlson traded emails with Dirk Hohndel of Intel, who will give the Summit’s August 6 opening keynote address.

As a hacker-turned-businessman, Hohndel brings a business perspective of free software to the Desktop Summit. Currently Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel, Hohndel will talk about the role that large companies play in open source, and how the open source community can work effectively with them.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

On the screen, you can see the lock-keys-appket, as well as gnote, gnome-music-applet and the cpu-frequency-monitor applet. Also visible are the trashcan and the show desktop applets, the ‘fast user switch’ applet (Called gdm-classic-user-switch-applet in the repo) and the gnome-volume-control applet which was sadly missing from the initial BlueBubble launch. I’d like to throw a huge ‘thank you’ to Thomas Scheunemann for helping me out with the gnome-volume-control applet. To prevent some conflicts between old-gnome-media and new-gnome-media packages…

Facebook had blocked applications that use the KDE Image Plugins Interface (KIPI) from uploading photographs to the social network and hid existing photos that were previously uploaded via KIPI. KIPI is used by a number of applications such as digiKam, KPhotoAlbum and Gwenview.

The problem appears to be that what was meant to be a secret key and application ID for a now deprecated interface into Facebook was included in the KIPI source code. It is suspected that at some point spammers took the key and id and used it for their own malicious applications on Facebook. This hasn’t been a problem for KDE users, but now Facebook has instituted a new scheme to block spam. This new anti-spam scheme correlates negative feedback on applications with their keys and ids and blocks them. The KDE keys, having been apparently poisoned by abusive use by spammers, were then blocked.

KDE prides itself as being a community. Is that justified? I have seen good, hard-working people driven away from projects because they were receiving behaviour from other members of our community that they would not accept from general users. The Code of Conduct, it seems, is for others, not for ourselves.

Red Flag Linux is a curious blend of modern and ancient. It has what you don’t expect it to have and lacks in what seems obvious. To name a few of the flaws, there’s the user setup, graphics card drivers, an outdated application stack, and the package manager problems. But the single biggest problem is the relevance.

I don’t presume to be able to understand the needs of the Chinese market, so my conclusion might be completely wrong or irrelevant itself. Perhaps the average Chinese users cares nothing about security or the age of his programs. For that matter, Windows XP is not a young or modern system either, but it’s popular and it works well. The way I see it, Red Flag Linux could be a very useful and practical system.

What it needs is to bring up some of its core elements to a more modern standard. Not necessarily become the next Ubuntu, because there’s already one and there’s no need for another, more sort of tailor its unique nature to become more accessible. Now, it’s entire possible that the distro developers do NOT want or care about foreign market segments, in which case all my arguments are pointless. But with some attention to details, Red Flag Linux could work well for the international user.

I hope this Linux continues to flourish. It’s not the best in any category, in fact, it’s fairly average overall, but it could achieve what no other Linux distro has done yet – reach a critical userbase. Even if as little as 1% of Chinese people embrace this platform, we’re talking some fifteen million users. Do you understand the implications of this? I do.

To sum it up: Red Flag Linux, average, needs lots of polish, decent performance, programs need updating, has the potential to make Linux become what no other distro has achieved yet. Final grade: 6/10.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

On the Linux Planet, free and open source software makes the world go around, while in the wider world, it’s often money. There is one Linux vendor that stands head and shoulders above all others when it comes to money. This past week, Red Hat reiterated its commitment and path to be the first Linux vendor to make $1 billion in revenue in one year.

Fedora

Let me translate that into normal people language: Linpus is a Taiwanese company that, from what I understood, wants to bring users simple and intuitive interfaces, through Linux of course. So you can imagine I was at least curios to try an Linux OS more interface-based and see what has been done to it.

Linpus Linux Lite is a Fedora-based distro that wants to be very easy and intuitive for its users. The first thing i noticed when i slamed the ISO into my VirtualBox is that you can’t boot straight from the CD, you can only install it to the hard drive, which is a pity since i wanted to try it out first.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Knoppix is a top choice for developers, administrators, or anyone on the move. Unlike many other popular Linux distributions Knoppix stays focused on providing one of the best Linux live CD’s available. Now you can have a huge selection of excellent applications and system tools all without any changes to your current system setup. Knoppix is also a great choice for carrying on a flash drive. Not to mention the fact that Knoppix has very advanced hardware detection. So download this great release today and find out why Knoppix is known by many as one of the best Linux Live CD’s available. Many users have reported that Knoppix was so useful that it is now used as their default installation. And yes Knoppix can be installed to your hard drive without to much trouble but it is not recommended for Linux newcomers.

Canonical/Ubuntu

The newest addition to the Ubuntu Software Center is Puzzle Moppet from Garnet Games. The poor little Moppet is lost and all alone in the wilderness. How are you going to help it get out? This interesting game requires you to solve puzzles to help Moppet find it’s way. Puzzle Moppet is a challenging 3D puzzle game featuring a diminutive and apparently mute creature who is lost in a mysterious floating landscape.

Comparatively, Linux Mint automatically includes out-of-the-box support for Flash, MP3′s, and the playback of most other media files. At the time, this more complete out-of-the-box experience was one of the reasons I ended up going back to Linux Mint 10 (from Ubuntu 10.04). So, now that Ubuntu includes this, (and in fact, installs even more software automatically such as NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers), it has, at very least, removed one of the reasons I had for sticking with Linux Mint.

Flavours and Variants

There are so many groovy little details that differentiate Zorin OS from Ubuntu here I can’t go over every one. But for instance, when you minimize a running application to the panel, it gives a lovely thumbnail preview of the app on mouse-over. And the default Start Menu (upper left corner in my screenshot below) is also highly configurable. I think there are about ten different menu styles you can use besides the Windows-like default. (Again, see screenshot below). I totally love the Linux Mint Menu, but after getting used to the different variations in Zorin OS I’ve come to like theirs almost as much. There are many similarities between Zorin OS and Linux Mint; the attention to detail and ease of use make either of them excellent choices for Windows or Mac users to cross over to the Linux side!

Nokia may have launched its first and last Meego-powered smartphone, but Intel remains determined to press ahead with the development of its versatile Linux-based operating system.

According to DigiTimes, Santa Clara is preparing to launch MeeGo v1.3, which will offer improved support for a variety of devices and platforms, including netbooks, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs and car infotainment systems.

Phones

Android

Clayton Morris of Fox did nothing but proved himself to be a joker the way he compared the iPad with the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The way he blindfolded himself on the camera and did an entire 30 second stint ‘touching’ and ‘feeling’ the Galaxy Tab made me think,”is this how we cover technology?” While he admitted that the Samsung Galaxy looks good, feels better, is lighter and thinner, he doesn’t recommend buying it.

He said that advancement in hardware and design do not matter. How the product feels in your hand doesn’t matter. He is contradicting himself, and may upset the master Apple. Look at any of the iPad ads and you will find Apple trying to sell using the same points which Morris is trying to tell us do not matter when it comes to Android!

Posh watchmaker Tag Heuer hopes you will – it’s working on just such a beast. There’s a teaser on Tag Heuer’s own website, but watch blog A Blog To Read has been mailed some snaps of the gadget and the specs.

Google’s Andy Rubin says Android is now being activated on 500,000 smartphones and tablets each day, with 4.4 percent week-to-week growth. Meanwhile, new rumors claim Google’s next Samsung-built Nexus device will run “Ice Cream Sandwich” on a TI OMAP4 processor and be called Google Nexus Prime.

Cisco Systems has announced an app ecosystem for its Android-based Cius tablet. Marking the company’s entry into a crowded landscape, “AppHQ” will focus on IT managers and professionals, according to the company.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Italian vendor Ekoore announced three tablets with capacitive multitouch displays — two Atom-based tablets that run Ubuntu 11.04 or Windows 7, and an ARM-based tablet running Android 2.3. The 11.6-inch “Perl” offers a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450; the 10.2-inch “Python” moves to the DDR3-ready Atom N455; and the seven-inch Android 2.3-based “Pascal” uses a new 1.2GHz Telechips TCC8803 processor, according to the company.

Acer began accepting pre-orders for its Wi-Fi only AC700 Chromebook for $350 on Amazon.com. Following Samsung’s $430 Series 5 Chromebook — and again based on Google’s Chrome OS — the AC700 notebook offers the same dual-core Intel Atom N570 processor, a slightly smaller 11.6-inch display, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 16GB solid-state disk, a multi-card reader, and a webcam.

The 2011 Tux Paint Summer Drawing Contest is sponsored by Worldlabel.com and is open to all children aged 3 to 12 who live anywhere in the World!

Here’s a chance to show off your talent using a great drawing program made especially for kids. Tux Paint is an award-winning drawing program you can download to your computer. Tux Paint was recently awarded SourceForge.net Project of the Month. It will run on all versions of Windows (including Tablet PC), Mac OS X 10.4 and up, Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. And it’s FREE!

Voice over IP services provider Gradwell has won the Federation of Communications Services (FCS) “Communication Provider of the Year” award. Managing Director Peter Gradwell accepted the award, presented at FCS’s 30th birthday celebrations, saying it was a “great reflection of all our hard work… being recognised by the FCS is especially important as they represent the whole industry.”

As well as hard work, Gradwell’s secret weapon for competitiveness is open source; at the core of the operation is Asterisk VoIP software running on Debian GNU/Linux based systems and nearly all the company’s communications stack is based on open source software. Thanks to this combination, Gradwell says it can sell a complete telephony solution at a price that is closer to a single licence of its competition. It isn’t all about pricing though.

Austin, Texas-based startup Ravel has released GoldenOrb, an open-source graph database that looks to bring the benefit’s of Google’s Pregel project to the masses. Graph databases don’t get the attention of other big-data technologies such as Hadoop or NoSQL, but every Twitter user is familiar with the result of what graph databases can do.

The 2011 ESA Summer of Code In Space (SOCIS) starts! Mentoring organization (i.e. open source space-related projects) can apply before 15/07/2011. Modelled after the Google Summer of Code, SOCIS is an European Space Agency pilot project offering students the opportunity to be paid to develop, during the summer, open source code for space related open source projects.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has published the programme for this year’s ApacheCon North America. ApacheCon NA 2011, the official user conference of the Apache Software Foundation, will take place from 7 to 11 November in Vancouver, Canada.

The organisers of linux.conf.au (LCA) have announced a Call for Papers (CFP) for the conference, which will take place at the beginning of 2012 in Ballarat, Australia. Interested parties have until 29 July to submit proposals for papers or presentations.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Firefox was always the coolest browser but it is rapidly losing that crown to Google’s Chrome

I’ve been a fan of Firefox for the longest time. Over the years I have faithfully installed just about every version of the open source browser and, while I chopped and changed between e-mail clients, web-editors and word processors, I always remained faithful to Firefox.

That was until about three months ago. That was when I first installed Google’s Chrome browser as more than just a test version. Until then I had always had a copy of Chrome to hand, but only for testing purposes, and never as my day-to-day browser. However, Firefox (I forget which version) was playing up and constantly crashing, so I decided to give Chrome a real chance.

So in keeping with the direction the devs at Mozilla have been steering the Firefox browser, plans include more feature assassination (of course), this time in the form of obfuscating useful information — arguably the most important information for users of a web browser — in the address bar.

Open source and cross platform messaging client Instantbird version 1.0 has been released today. Instantbird is based on Pidgin’s libpurple protocol library and Mozilla’s Firefox technology. It supports all major messaging services and have an extension system for adding extra functionality, themes etc.

With a new Mozilla chief executive, a new six-week rapid-release cycle, and new Firefox management, apparently the organization has concluded there’s no time like the present to pin down an answer.

“Now that we have a solid base to work from, and greatly improved agility, it’s a good time to look at the quickly-evolving landscape and chart our path forward,” Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of product, said in a mailing list message on Friday. “To that end, I’ve tried to synthesize and distill countless discussions and ideas I’ve heard from throughout the Mozilla community over the last few years about where we should go with our products to further the Mozilla mission.”

SaaS

Yes, the world can make its own software and share it. Hadoop is already in use by many players on the web, cloud and just data-processing. From a few (Able Grape search engine for wines) to thousands (Yahoo!) of nodes working together can process a lot of data and keep it safe. The software is sufficiently complex and flexible that training/support should be a lucrative business sufficient in itself to justify the investment in Hadoop. At the same time the whole world benefits from the result.

Yahoo! is creating a new company with its core Hadoop engineering team, seeking to rapidly expand the scope of the open source distributed number-crunching platform and ultimately bring it to a much wider audience. In growing the Hadoop “ecosystem” through increased work on the core Apache-based open source project, the company hopes to eventually make its money by providing training and support for the platform.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

The last week saw as set back of sorts for Oracle, as the US patent analysts rejected 17 claims of the 21 infringements claimed by Oracle on one of the seven infringement claims it had filed against Google. However, there are further 122 claims to wade through.

In recent weeks, Oracle has taken two premier open source technologies gained through the company’s 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems — the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and the Project Hudson continuous integration server — and donated them to the Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, respectively.

CMS

When I began speaking to Ryan Ozimek on the phone, the first thing I asked him was how – in a world where a social networking site gets major coverage for surpassing 10 million users – an open source product like his can quietly reach over 20 million without much fanfare.

Ozimek, president of the nonprofit that oversees Joomla, the product in question, told me that nonprofits often have less incentive to publicize such milestones. “Joomla isn’t a corporate enterprise,” he explained. “Joomla is made by developers around the world freely giving their time to something they’re passionate about and is managed and run by a leadership team and a nonprofit organization that doesn’t really have any financial stake in the game.

Business

Application developers can now use BIRT 3.7 from the Eclipse Foundation to access Hadoop using Hive Query Language (HQL).

Actuate (NASDAQ: BIRT) has announced support and services for Hadoop and MapReduce in the new release of BIRT 3.7, the company’s open-source enterprise business intelligence toolset.

Hadoop is an open source framework for managing vast amounts of distributed data (big data) that works in conjunction with MapReduce, a framework to support distributed computing for large data sets on hardware clusters.

Funding

Open source became a movement – a mentality. Suddenly infrastructure software was nearly free. We paid 10% of the normal costs for the software and that money was for software support. A 90% disruption in cost spawns innovation – believe me.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

The evolution of software carries a different pace depending upon the management structure and goals of the project. Here we explore the history of, and potential for evolutionary theories of software development.

Public Services/Government

Half of all public administrations in the Netherlands (51 percent) has a strategy for open source or is preparing such a plan, and half (53 percent) has specific plans to use more of this type of software. These are two of the conclusions of a survey by NOiV, the Dutch government’s resource centre on open source and open standards.

The survey also shows that 66 percent of all public administrations in the country supports the vendor independent electronic document format ODF, and has made it an option for their staff (69 percent). Next, the vendor independent document format PDF is being used to publish non-revisable documents on the web site of 62 percent of the public administrations.

Open source enthusiast Liam Maxell has been appointed as technology adviser to the Cabinet Office

In a move that could hint at the Government’s future direction over open source technology, Liam Maxwell has been appointed as technology adviser to the Cabinet Office.

Maxwell has worked as an advisor for the Conservative Party regarding technology and is widely considered to be the man behind the Government’s open source strategy drive, which is now being executed by the Cabinet Office. Maxwell was also the IT manager at public school Eton, as well as previously being a Tory councillor for Windsor and Maidenhead, which pioneered the use of virtualisation to cut costs.

Conservative local councillor and head of computing at public school Eton, Liam Maxell, has been appointed as technology adviser to the Cabinet Office, in a move that could herald wider use of open source technology in government.

Maxwell will advise the Efficiency and Reform Group within the Cabinet Office on how technology can deliver better quality, lower cost public services. His appointment, starting from September, is expected to last for 11 months.

This is what some respondents had to say about systems integrators and Open Source software:

“Systems integrators are not holding back the take up of Open Source in the public sector it is just paranoid rubbish.”

“I am sure some systems integrators are holding Open Source in the public sector back, however I know that the more progressive systems integrators aren’t.”

“I think systems integrators are holding back Open Source. I have no examples but industry sees public sector as a cash cow.”

“The government IT capability is rarely willing to challenge the views of system integrators.”

“Money is the reason system integrators hold back Open Source. With open source their profits go down.”

“System integrators are holding Open Source back. Particularly the reseller SIs who have a significant conflict of interest to deal with and will erode sales margins by doing so. Equally the government employs consultants who aren’t oriented towards open source solutions but aligned and accredited to vendor programmes.”

Programming

GitHub has released its Linguist library, designed to identify the programming language in a file, as open source. GitHub, a commercial project hosting service which handles files of numerous types, uses the library to detect which syntax highlighter to use for a file, to work out when to ignore binary files and generated files, and to generate graph data for projects by language.

Cablegate

Julian took WikiLeaks offline early in 2010 to boost donations. And it worked. The organisation made over $200,000 in the first big push. This represented cash like never before. And Daniel’s eyes popped.

So Daniel argued with Julian argued about the money. Daniel always found something he didn’t like, found a reason to challenge Julian’s wisdom and way of running WikiLeaks, but most of all he argued about the money – he wanted it.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

IEA in Paris announced this morning a release of 60 million barrels from OECD inventories. The implications of this extraordinary action are not positive. Let’s first take a look at the most recent global production data, which shows the large downward move of supply coming into March 2011, from the loss of Libyan oil. IEA is pointing to this loss of supply as the prima causa for its decision. | see: Global Crude Oil Production in mbpd (million barrels per day) 2004-2011.

Unfortunately, it does not appear OECD nations have been successful in getting the price of oil down below $100. There remains a justifiable suspicion that Saudi Arabia cannot supply the market either with extra light sweet oil, or with extra oil of any grade, for longer than a month or two. If China and Western countries have indeed made an arrangement to swap these oil price knock-downs for support of Western sovereign debt (at the margin), China would be advised to fill its own inventories quickly when these brief, five-to-seven day discounts on oil arrive, only to disappear.

In October 2007, CNBC’s Diana Olick called me about Countrywide’s so-called plan to modify mortgage loans scheduled to reset to higher rates. Subprime borrowers with a strong payment history would be able to refinance and possibly get prime FHA loans. Current paying borrowers with credit issues would be offered Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac loans under a new expanded program.

The State of California reported a loss of 29,000 non-farm payrolls in May. Actually, California added 88,000 jobs in May when using the total employment data for the month. However, as I have pointed out over the past year, these oscillations are just noise. Our nation’s largest state faces a protracted, structural level of unemployment that renders these month to month rises and falls unimportant. The over-focus on this data by the media, however, reveals an ongoing conceptual problem currently afoot in the US: the persistent belief we are in a standard, post-war recession. | see: California Employment in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2000-2011.

Censorship

Paris, June 29th, 2011 – The final OECD communiqué on Internet Policy-Making Principles has been published. The entertainment industries and a few governments ultimately let blind copyright enforcement repression undermine the text’s support of fundamental freedoms and the Net’s openness. La Quadrature du Net supports the civil society coalition’s rejection of a bad compromise and of the final document.

Intellectual Monopolies

The Création-Public-Internet (CPI) platform brings together consumer, artist and citizen organisations such as La Quadrature du Net in France. Today, the CPI is launching a campaign for the legal recognition of not-for profit file sharing between individuals and for instituting new statutory resource pooling for the fair and democratically governed financing of digital creation.

Copyrights

La Quadrature du Net adds its voice to the 80 global civil society groups that have declined endorsing the OECD’s communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making. Although the text puts forward positive recommendations, rights and freedoms online are severely undermined by the call for private policing of the network, opening the door to automated censorship in the name of copyright.

The 80 global civil society groups represented at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) under the umbrella of CSISAC have rejected the draft communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making. La Quadrature du Net adds its voice to that of CSISAC, and regrets the OECD member countries’ stubborn defense of the entertainment industries’ obsolete business models, which is bound to undermine the very principles that the communiqué rightly puts forward.

Paris, June 27th, 2011 – The OECD countries are finalizing a communiqué about the future of the Internet. The outcome could either be a text favourable to citizens’ fundamental freedoms, or a push towards more repression and private policing of the Internet, in line with the ACTA agreement, the G8′s conclusions and EU copyright strategy.

Defence/Police/Aggression

an Open Source Agency (OSA) that would create public intelligence in the public interest while encouraging everything open — Open Spectrum, Open Source Software, Open Data Access are just a few examples. It would create National Intelligence Estimates using only legally and ethically available information in all languages … creating intelligence (decision-support) that is totally public and transparent in nature …

Imagine Open Core government. You are free except where you are not and there are no secrets except where there are. As in software, it’s better to call it “free” and be clear about what you mean.

Separately … ISPs would [voluntarily] block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay on a list drawn up by copyright owners.

The article uses the propaganda term “piracy” to refer to unauthorized sharing and confuses hosting copies with linking to them. These efforts have turned me off and I minimize my MPAA entertainment spending because of them.

Privacy

This would not be surprising, given the way the US government currently does the same to US citizens but the “active involvement” of Google is only tenuously supported. Everyone should avoid non free software, especially on network connected devices like cell phones.

Intellectual Monopolies

there are often mysteries around the financial relationship between an inventor and the troll company, or the various interrelated companies, in patent troll lawsuits. If we start really digging, might we find some barratry going on there too?